Уолтер Мосли - Down the River unto the Sea

The masculine chatter stopped then. Antrobus studied me with his slitty eyes and nodded ever so slightly.

“For what purpose?” he asked when my question was almost forgotten.

“He said that Marmot was leaning on him and that he needed leverage.”

“What kind of leverage?”

“That I do not know. I met a man named Porker who told me that he knew another man who said Marmot worked for you.”

“A man who knows a man who knows about me?”

“That’s the way it is in my business.”

After a fair length Antrobus asked, “And so why come here just because a man told a man that the man you’re stalking might have something to do with me?”

“I wanted to see if you were as serious as I heard.”

“And am I?”

I smiled, wondering what my new face looked like with that expression on it.

“I don’t need to do any more stalking if you and I can come to an agreement.”

“You say,” Antrobus parried, “that someone representing Braun hired you.”

I nodded without smiling.

“Who is that?”

“Someone calling themselves Lacey.”

“A lacey beard?” he asked.

I refrained from smiling again. You can often identify a man by his grin.

“What do you want, Mr. Beard?”

“Six thousand dollars in cash and Mr. Marmot falls off my radar.”

“Hardly a fair business practice,” Antrobus observed.

“I’m not applying for a position.”

Antrobus roared with laughter.

“Do we have a deal?” I asked.

Sunset came before 5:00 at that time of year. The ferry moved peacefully through the dusk toward the Saint George dock. I was standing in my bulky and bulbous costume at the front of the boat, enjoying the stiff breeze and thinking that I had done a good job of putting myself off the scent for an afternoon.

I had killed a man that day, and the amoral stench of that action hung about me. There were sixty-six hundred-dollar bills in my right front pocket, proof that Stuart Braun was going to have to deal with me sooner or later — if he survived.

A short man with a broad chest came out on the mostly abandoned deck and stared at me for all of forty-five seconds; then he turned away.

Maybe I looked like someone he knew.

In Saint George I made a pay phone call, then boarded the commuter train and sat at the south end of the center car, looking back and wondering why I felt so calm. Life was coming down on me like grain filling up an empty silo, but there I was moving backward in a modern marvel of technology. Life was like the miracle of a tiger on the hunt, only no one around me seemed to appreciate this fact.

Then the door at the far end of the car slid open, and the short white guy with the broad chest who had eyed me on the ferry came through. He wore jeans and tennis shoes, a maroon wool sweater under a loose pale green sweatshirt — its hood thrown back.

He saw me and moved with purpose toward my throne of wonder.

“You the niggah they call Cueball,” he said when he was maybe three steps off.

The other people around me moved away. All except for an older gentleman directly across the aisle. He was also white, wearing a dark blue pea coat, black work boots and pants.

I noticed the brave older gentleman while feeling a little stunned by the short stranger’s language.

I tried to remember the last time someone had called me nigger. Even my black male acquaintances had mostly given up that tag.

I put my right hand in a yellow pocket and stared.

“You heard me?” my antagonist asked. He was powerful, no doubt. And he was as mad as hell about something; probably had been most of his life. The only thing left to know was if he was a fool or not. There was a gun in that pocket, and I’d already proven to myself that I was unafraid to use it.

Usually when a man reaches in his pocket to threaten a would-be attacker he’s bluffing. But I have found that if you don’t say anything the threat seems more real.

“Well?” the short man said.

I said nothing.

He took a step.

“Junior,” the older man said.

The racist turned his head and saw the older man, maybe for the first time — that day.

“Ernesto,” he said, his voice trying and failing to express both anger and respect.

“You see the man doesn’t know you,” the brave oldster explained. “You see he’s about to kill you. Leave him alone. He’s not Cueball.”

The man’s words carried weight, and after a moment of contemplation, Junior decided to retrace his steps back to some other car.

When he was gone I asked Ernesto, “What was that?”

“Boy lost his girl to a black man named Cueball,” he said. “Bald, you know? Junior thinks the guy took her from him. He don’t see that the last time he put her in the hospital was the day she stopped bein’ his friend.”

“Well,” I said, “thanks for gettin’ him off me.”

“I don’t give a fuck about you, man. Junior too stupid to understand you got a real gun in there. I could see his death in the corner of your eye.”

Pleasant Plains was seventeen stops from Saint George. Ernesto went the whole way and beyond. We didn’t talk anymore, and I was on the lookout then for others who didn’t celebrate the Underground Railroad of Staten Island.

Mel was waiting at the station. Pay phones still had some use.

We walked up to each other and shook hands.

“Almost didn’t recognize you in that getup,” he observed.

“Looks like you got a friend. Can’t be too careful these days.”

I turned and saw the angry young white man whose fists were still crying out for satisfaction.

I gave Mel an abbreviated account of what had happened.

“Wait here,” he said, and then he strolled over to Junior.

A few sentences passed between them, and Mel took out a cell phone. He entered something, said something, and then handed Junior the phone. The younger man had a brief conversation at the end of which he shook his head as if indicating to whomever he was speaking that he did not wish whatever had been suggested. Then he gave Mel back his cell, turned, and hightailed it to whatever bar he used to assuage his feelings of inferiority and loss.

We walked fourteen blocks from the train station to the church and didn’t speak until we were both seated in a kitchen set behind where the choir once praised God.

“Yeah, sometimes it’s like that” were Mel’s first words to me.

“Like what?”

“Sometimes there’s just a black cloud over your head. If there’s trouble anywhere near, it will come to you first.”

“Like your red bird.”

Mel smiled.

“What did you say to Junior?” I asked just to be talking.

“I called a guy named Genaro. He’s one of the connected guys on the island. He told Junior to climb back in his hole.”

“Genaro knows you’re here?”

“On the island. I got an apartment on the water in Saint George.”

“There was this guy on the train,” I said. “Junior called him Ernesto.”

“Used to be an enforcer in the fifties and sixties,” Mel said, nodding.

“Now he just rides the trains?”

“It’s a peaceful life out here,” he said, and we both laughed.

Mel made a tomato sauce with chicken thighs and hot peppers, which he poured over vermicelli. With that we had sweetened Chianti and a salad that any French chef would have been proud of.

I told Mel about the kidnapping and Antrobus, also about Inspector Dennis Natches and how he might have something to do with the frame that bounced me out of my profession.

“You’re still a detective,” he pointed out.

“But I’m not a cop.”

“Yeah,” Mel admitted. “When pretty high school girls grow up they’re no longer cheerleaders, but they’re still pretty girls.”